At the Edge of Ireland (2 page)

Edmund Spenser, poet, 1596:

Ah to be sure it is yet a most bewtifull and sweete country as any is under Heaven.

A Quandary:
Southern Star
5/13/06:

The enthusiasm surrounding the launch of a new marketing tool for Cork-Kerry Tourism was offset by the confusion surrounding the upcoming disbandonment of Cork-Kerry Tourism.

Benjamin Disraeli:

Ah Ireland…That damnable delightful country, where everything that is right is the opposite of what it ought to be.

Brendan Behan:

Sex is still in its infancy in Ireland.

Weather,
Irish Times,
17 May 2006:

There will be early morning showers becoming heavier and more persistent as the day progresses. This is now the 22nd consecutive day of this forecast.

“Water and Whiskey,” from
St. Patrick's People,
Tony Gray. Macmillan, 1996:

Irishmen don't take much water in their whiskey. They're deeply prejudiced against it, perhaps for the very good reason that there's far too much of it about. You can't get away from water in Ireland.

Shane Connaughton:

Jesus must have been an Irishman. After all, He was unmarried at thirty-two years old, still living at home, and His mother thought he was God.

Patrick Murray:

God created alcohol just to stop the Irish ruling the world.

A
NUMBER OF YEARS AGO
I spent a week or so roaming the wild moorland hills and ragged coastline of County Kerry's Dingle Peninsula. Set deep in the southwest corner of Ireland, far above and far less discovered than the overtouristic Killarney and the Ring of Kerry (aka the Iveragh Peninsula), The Dingle is the northernmost of the five mountainous peninsulas that thrust out like ancient gnarled fingers into the Atlantic. It was, as far as I can remember, a most intriguing if rather predictable romp of village dances, stout-drinking nights in lopsided pubs rowdy with Irish folk music, quaint guest-houses serving true Irish “comfort food” (heavy on “salt-meadow” lamb, just-caught fish, and such strange vegetable concoctions as
boxty, pandy, strand
, and
fadge
), and locals whose ability to befriend with good-humored graciousness softened the dramatic desolation of the moors and mountain ranges all around.

After that week, The Dingle seemed to me the epitome of an authentic Irish experience. One that I promised myself to repeat, and maybe I would even trace my own Anglo-Irish roots to learn something about my father's mother's County Mayo heritage. And I did indeed return—to prepare a chapter for my book
The World's Secret Places (National Geographic)
—only to find that, while still majestic in its scenic appeal, the Dingle had gone tourist in ways that had blurred and distorted its original unfussy, unself-conscious appeal.

I was ready to move on and out until the owner of a small B and B in Tralee suggested that “if it's in search of the ‘real Ireland' that y'are, y'd best be sneakin' a peep at Mór Choaird Bheara, the Beara Peninsula, before that gets ‘Dingled' too!” Actually his advice was a little more succinct: “I'd bugger off to Beara, fast as y'can now, before that fella over there sees y've bin chattin' up his bird…”

I was going to explain that my “chattin' up” was merely an innocent discussion about the Dingle's recent and remarkable surge in popularity when I spotted the boyfriend pushing up his sleeves in a particularly determined manner…

My journey was not wasted (as obviously I could have been). Beara is certainly a long way from being “Dingled.” “Stubbornly and gloriously remote at the edge of the world,” was the way one local described it at MacCarthy's Bar in Castletownbere. William Makepeace Thackeray was a little more flowery, as befits that famous nineteenth-century author: “Here is a country the magnificence of which no pen can give an idea.” Leon Uris in his book
Ireland: A Terrible Beauty
writes more recently: “‘The Bere' [local spelling] is the least toured but the most spectacular of the peninsulas and shows herself to be an eerie beauty of the mists, especially suited for the ghosts and fairies who live there…Wind, fog, sea and craggy rock crescendo here with the wildest of Ireland's wild moors, giving testimony to the mysticism of the land.” Mysteries that have also lured here such other notable writers as William Wordsworth, Anthony Trollope, Sir Walter Scott, Alfred Tennyson, and much more recently, Daphne du Maurier, George Bernard Shaw, James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, Brendan Behan, W. B. Yeats, J. M. Synge, Sean O'Casey, Seamus Heaney, and many others. A fine host of mutual Beara celebrants!

H. V. Morton, in his classic book
In Search of Ireland
, suggests: “Here [on Beara], away from the roads and among mountains that go down sharply to the sea, you understand why in such lonely places the Irish believe in fairies and things not of this earth…High up on the hillsides, there is a reek of peat and the distant creak of a cart grinding the dust of the road, then silence deep as the ocean—the silence of enchanted hills, the silence of the sky.” Morton admits to being utterly seduced by this beguiling region: “It encourages fantastic thought…There is one sign that a writer is beginning to enjoy Ireland: he stops writing. There is another: he disappears. This generally happens when he enters County Kerry!”

George Bernard Shaw

Other writers, however, were a little less gushy. Dublin-born James Joyce, who spent little time in the country, dismissed the whole of Ireland as “a mere afterthought of Europe.” And Louis MacNeice wrote: “The Irish have nothing but an insidious bonhomie, an obsolete bravado and a way with horses.” But, there again—he was from Belfast in Northern Ireland, a whole different kind of country.

So Anne, my wife and favorite traveling companion, and I plan on following H. V. Morton's example and…disappearing. Although the writing will continue, here on this thirty-mile-long peninsula, with a population of around 14,000 (in a nation of around four million), half in County Kerry and half in County Cork. Beara is blessed with some of the finest Gulf Stream–bathed coastal scenery in Ireland: glacier-gouged mountain passes and trails across the Caha and Slieve Miskish ranges on the 125-mile-long Beara Way; prehistoric remnants and stone circles; bird and seal colony islands; whale-watching perches on the 700-foot-high Mizen Head cliffs; color-be-decked villages (tiny Allihies and Eyeries also have small but flourishing artist communities); ancient castles and manors—and, of course, history. The full gamut of that riotous Irish heritage of revolutions, decimations, evictions, emigrations, famines, and ultimately celebrations of hard-won freedoms that are at the very heart of Irish poetry, literature, and folk songs. Songs that can make you weep, laugh, curse, and cheer all in the flow of a few melodic stanzas while the stout pours out, thick and black, in the traditional grocery store–pubs that are the focal point of every village on this “secret” peninsula.

I remember one splendid folk song about St. Brendan, who set off in a tiny
curagh
(a wattle and cowskin boat) and supposedly discovered America. Apparently it was not unusual for monks who sought to bear witness to their faith to set sail without food, water, or any means of steering. This sometimes proved a remarkably convenient and rapid way of getting to heaven rather than to the New World. Or anywhere else for that matter.

Castletownbere

And while significant tourist trappings in Beara are a long way off yet—due in part to the narrowness of its roads and the rugged nature of its topography—it's good to know that the charmingly unspoilt town of Kenmare (population 6,500 or so) offers some of the finest dining outside Dublin, not to mention some of the best handmade lace in the world. In addition the villages here, while simple and remote, are celebrated for their beauty and authenticity. Quaint Castletownbere has one of the busiest fishing harbors in the southwest, along with its beloved ultratraditional famed MacCarthy's pub offering pure Irish ambience—what the writer Pete McCarthy describes as: “The dream Irish pub of the popular romantic imagination.”

So who's this Pete McCarthy? you might well ask.

Well, sadly he's now the late Pete McCarthy, who passed away from cancer in 2003 at far too young an age. But from all accounts he lived a full life as an actor, writer, professional scriptwriter and comedian, BBC radio commentator, traveler and travel filmmaker and TV travel program presenter (and seemed to possess the potential for a dozen more multi-incarnations). And it was his hilarious and very popular travel book,
McCarthy's Bar
, that was another reason Anne and I felt lured to Beara. Pete had set himself the enviable task of meandering around the west of Ireland in search of bars that bore his surname. Despite an Anglo-Irish identity, he had a strong leaning toward the latter and was an enthusiastic proponent of the “eighth rule of serious travel”: “Never pass a bar that has your name on it.”

So—using a montage of extracts from his book—this is how Pete came to discover the magic of Beara for himself:

[An impromptu conversation with a builder in a bar.] “So, looking for ya roots are ya? Like all them poor feckin' Yanks in Killarney…Where you heading next then? Have you been out to the Beara Peninsula?”

I never have; a piece of news which is greeted by sighs of pity and incredulity all around. I've heard about it all right, a wild strip of land poking out into the Atlantic off the Western fringe of Cork.

“It's a beautiful place. You'll find plenty of McCarthy's out that way to make you feel at home.”

It's a nice idea but there just isn't time to go to Beara.

“And there's a MacCarthy's pub out there, real old style, never been changed.”

“I really couldn't change my plans now.”

“Why the feck not?”

[Another customer joins in.] “I reckon there's only two kinds of people, the Irish and the wannabe Irish.”

Clearly she's one of the former, but what if I'm one of the latter?

Pete finally has to make a decision in the gorgeously verdant, Gulf Stream–lapped town of Glengarriff. Go north to the Ring of Kerry and the Dingle Peninsula or be serendipitous and take the narrow road west down into Beara.

A man after my own wanderlusting Anglo-Irish heart, Pete decided to go west into

an altogether wilder place…with stark mountains of biblical ruggedness…Radiant shafts of sunlight pierce the dark bruise of cloud cover and hit the water with a metallic flash, as if to prove there is a Creator and his taste is for random and terrifying beauty. By heading for Beara instead of following my intended route I suppose I'm hoping to leave the world of plans and arrangements behind, lay claim to my share of Ireland's spontaneous and disorganized ebullience and see if I really fit in. I'll simply turn up at MacCarthy's bar and see what happens. If nothing does, I can go away again.

So God bless you, Pete, for following the finest of travel instincts and spontaneously pursuing the hidden and the authentic—and in doing so, encouraging us to follow you in your serendipitous adventures into Ireland's “hidden corners.”

And this is what I'll be describing in this book—how a nation, currently booming with newfound prosperity as part of the European Union, and known proudly now as the Celtic Tiger—still manages to hide away such little gems of authenticity and awe as the Beara Peninsula. But from time to time, Anne and I will also “disappear” and just like Yeats dreamed:

I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,

And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made,